The present invention belongs to the technical filed of analyzing radioactive nuclides, including an apparatus or system for remotely monitoring liquid wastes produced from the radioactivity handling facilities and a liquid-phase environmental sample contaminated by radiation accidents.
The present invention relates to an apparatus and system for remotely analyzing radioactivity nuclides, in which a central computer controls all the following processes and transceives the resulting data in real time: on-line collecting liquid-phase radioactive nuclear wastes, preparing a sample to be measured, analyzing radioactivity from the sample, and analyzing the final results.
In a conventional method of analyzing beta emitting nuclides (also called, “beta emitters”) existing in the liquid wastes, the beta emitters to be analyzed was purely extracted out of a sample acquired from the wastes by means of chemical separation method, and measured by using a liquid scintillation counter. However, in such a method, an analyzing person suffers from an inconvenience of having to collect a sample from the wastes by himself/herself every analysis, and there was a possibility that the analyzing person might be exposed to the radioactivity and the environment might be contaminated by the radioactive nuclides existing in the sample.
In addition, if various mixed beta emitters exist in a sample, it was not possible to discriminate the respective beta emitters because of spectral overlap between the beta emitters having the similar energy level. Therefore, conventionally, the respective dedicated analyzing methods, each of which conforms to the respective nuclides had to be used. So, much time and efforts are required to analyze the beta emitters.
Furthermore, since a conventional liquid scintillation counter necessitated the heavy-weighed lead for shielding the influence of the exterior radiation, it was quite difficult to transport and set up the counter. Thus, radioactive analysis could be performed only in a laboratory, and therefore, there was a limitation in a prompt action against the radiation accident.
Therefore, to overcome the above problems of the conventional liquid scintillation counter, that collection and preparation of a sample to be measured should be performed manually and only a single nuclide can be analyzed from a single sample, the present invention provides an automatic radioactivity analyzer of mixed liquid beta emitters, which automates the whole processes ranging from collection of a sample to production of final measurement results, and adopts an algorithm for simultaneously analyzing mixed beta emitters so as to analyze various nuclides at the same time. In addition, a central PC can remotely control the analyzer and transceive the resulting data through a long-range communication network. Owing to lightness of the analyzer according to the present invention, the accessibility to the analyzing site will be improved and the installation of the analyzer becomes easier. By using the electronics and IT technologies being rapidly advanced recently to process and analyze the measured signal, the present invention exhibits high performance, multi-functionality, and high efficiency.